She said she was sure that Mr. Plumtree would suffer a great deal when he found he must give Fanny up, but she added something
which might be of interest to those who attach such overwhelming importance to the story of her early life; "it is no creed of mine, as you must be well aware, that such sort of disappointments kill anybody."
The carrying on of this correspondence, so important and so private, brings to light one extraordinary quality of Jane Austen's mind. A sister on terms of quite ordinary intimacy with another might have told that other what had been going on in her niece's affairs; that Jane should withhold something from Cassandra seems at first sight incredible; but she did so. Cassandra had been dining with Frank Austen's family at the Great House on the evening that Fanny's first letter arrived, and Jane had said it was a good thing Aunt Cassandra was out of the way, because once she had begun it, she could not bear to put it down. Another one was brought by Mr. Edward Knight himself, who "most conscientiously hunted about" till he found Jane
"alone in the dining parlor" before he gave it to her; but Cassandra had already seen that he had a packet of some sort to deliver, only happily Fanny had put the letter into a piece of music. "Your sending the music was an admirable device; it made everything easy; and I do not know how I could have accounted for the parcel otherwise. . .
. As it was, however, I do not think anything was suspected." On another occasion when Fanny was in the thick of the matter and raining down letters whose arrival everyone must notice, Jane
implored her: "Write something that will do to be read or told!"
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The fact that both Cassandra and Jane could be relied upon
implicitly to keep the confidence of their nieces even from each other, was recorded in his memoir by Mr. Edward Austen Leigh. In Jane's case particularly, with her acute interest in the heroine of the story, it is astonishing that she should have denied herself the pleasure of talking over the matter with Cassandra; but it was a matter of which Cassandra knew the essentials already; she would have had no wish to know the details which it seemed to Fanny just at present so important to keep quite private between herself and her Aunt Jane. There was every reason for Jane's refraining from
discussing the matter with her sister, except that in such
circumstances almost nobody would have refrained from so doing.
Before Jane left Hans Place she wrote to tell Fanny of the visit she had made to Anna. She said that as Fanny's father had also paid a visit from Hans Place, Fanny would be able to gather most of what she wanted to know from him. "Your papa will be able to answer almost every question. I certainly could describe her bedroom and her drawers and her closet better than he can, but I do not feel that I can stop to do it." Her letter showed that Anna, even though the married lady, was an interesting child, and Fanny almost another sister. Though Fanny was exactly Anna's age, for they were both twenty-one, Jane spoke to her of the bride as if Fanny herself were on quite a different level of intelligence and sense. She told Fanny she was sorry to hear that Anna was to have a piano after all: "It seems throwing money away. They will wish the twenty-four
guineas in the shape of sheets and towels six months hence, and as to her playing, it never can be anything." When Anna's trousseau was being prepared, her aunts from Chawton had seen it, and knew
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very well the standard, in number of garments and their degree of elegance, which the Steventon family could afford, and Anna's new life make necessary or suitable. Jane was surprised on visiting Hendon to see Anna in a violet pelisse whose existence had been quite unsuspected by her. Not, as she said, that she blamed Anna for having bought it. "It looked very well, and I dare say she wanted it. I suspect nothing worse than its being got in secret, and not owned to anybody. She is capable of that, you know."
She told Fanny also of a visit to Keppel Street, when "dear Uncle Charles" was at home with the little girls. The two-year-old Fanny was "a fine, stout girl," who talked all the time with a lisp and indistinctness that were very charming. Harriet, who was four, sat in her Aunt Jane's lap and was very affectionate. Cassy, however, who was old enough to remember having seen Aunt Jane before, did not rise to the occasion; the latter said: "That puss Cassy did not show more pleasure in seeing us than her sisters, but I expected no better;-
-she does not shine in the tender feelings. She will never be a Miss O'Neal;--more in the Mrs. Siddons line."
In the year of October 1814 to 1815, Anna and Ben left Hendon and came back to Hampshire once again. They took possession of
Wyards, near Alton, an old farmhouse which had been converted
into a private dwelling. Anna's baby, Anna Jemima, was born in October 1815, and the young mother had so much to do that Which Is the Heroine? was put aside. After her Aunt Jane's death Anna burned the manuscript, and one of her little daughters remembered sitting on the rug and watching it burn, "amused with the flames and the sparks which kept breaking out in the blackened paper." When the child was old enough, she said how
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sorry she was her mother should have burned the story, but Anna told her that she could never have borne to finish it; it brought back the loss of her Aunt Jane too vividly.
Which is the Heroine? was laid by, but Emma was finished. Jane went, as usual, to Henry while arrangements were made for its
publication. In the middle of October she was writing to Cassandra from Hans Place; the letter began with congratulations on the new cook at Chawton being able to make good apple pies; it went on to speak of the new publisher. Mr. Egerton was no longer acting for her, the fame of Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park was such that the second edition of the latter had been undertaken by the most fashionable and talked-of publisher in London--none other than the celebrated Mr. Murray. The fact that Murray had published for Lord Byron and enjoyed much of his confidence, and had been,
consequently, involved in Byron's meteoric career: visited and consulted by Byron's agitated friends, and hoaxed out of a portrait of his lordship by a forged letter presented by Lady Caroline Lamb, made of Mr. Murray something more than a publisher. To be
undertaken by him was not only a sign of successful authorship; it was an honor. It might have been expected that Jane Austen, writing to a sister in the country, would have devoted a good deal of space to talking of Mr. Murray. Actually, she summed him up in a sentence:
"He is a rogue, of course, but a civil one." Mr. Murray offered £450
for Emma, but he said the contract must include the copyright of Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility; and therefore for Emma alone he was offering roughly one-third of this sum; and as Jane Austen had made £140 on the first edition of Sense and Sensibility, as an author quite unknown, something in the nature of £150 for Emma, which was to include the copyright of that novel, was not as much as she, or as Henry for
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her, would naturally expect. But Mr. Murray was very civil; he sent Jane a letter containing so much praise as quite surprised her.
The weather of the 16th of October was like summer still. It did not suit Henry, who came home from Henrietta Street feeling feverish and bilious, and went straight to bed, leaving Jane to dine tête-à-tête with Mr. Seymour; Jane hoped he would be better by the morning.
But he was not; he stayed in bed all Tuesday, and on Wednesday Jane wrote to Chawton: "It is a fever-something bilious but chiefly inflammatory. I am not alarmed but I have determined to send this letter today by the post that you may know how things are going on."
She called in the apothecary from the corner of Sloane Street, Mr.
Haden, a very attentive and clever young man who seemed to
understand the case, and reassured her somewhat. "Henry," she said,
"is an excellent patient, lies quietly in bed and is ready to swallow anything. He lives upon medicine, tea and barley-water." He was in bed "in the back room upstairs." Jane added: "I am generally there also working o
r writing." In a day or two Henry seemed better and was able to dictate a letter to Mr. Murray in which he thanked him for his politeness and said that his favorable opinion of Emma was most gratifying; but that the sum Mr. Murray was offering for the three copyrights was not equal to the amount Jane Austen had
actually made already by one edition of Mansfield Park, and a still smaller one of Sense and Sensibility.
But before the matter could be agreed upon, Henry had suffered a sharp relapse. On October 22nd Jane sent expresses to Godmersham, Steventon and Chawton, for Edward, James and Cassandra. Edward arrived immediately, and James, who had gone to Chawton to fetch Cassandra, arrived with her the day after. For a week they thought
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Henry was dying. Jane and Cassandra nursed him night and day, in an unrelieved horror of suspense; but Henry's mercurial temperament was capable of startling seizures and equally rapid recoveries. After a week the two brothers felt able to go back to their families, leaving Jane and Cassandra, and at the end of October Jane was able to write to another niece who was engaged in literary composition; the ten-year-old Caroline was writing a story, and had sent it to Aunt Jane to look at.
Jane said: "I have not yet felt quite equal to taking up your manuscript, but I think I shall soon." Caroline was staying at Chawton with her grandmother, and her Aunt Martha, and her Aunt Jane said: "You will practice your music, of course, and I trust to you for taking care of my instrument and not letting it be ill-used in any respect.--Do not allow anything to be put on it, but what is very light."
The birth of Anna Jemima had exalted Caroline to the dignity of an aunt, and Jane concluded the letter by saying: "I am sorry you got wet in your ride; now that you are become an aunt, you are a person of some consequence and must excite great interest whatever you do.
I have always maintained the importance of aunts as much as
possible, and I am sure of your doing the same now. Believe me, my dear Sister-Aunt, yours affectionately, Jane Austen." A couple of months later she was writing to say--"My dear Caroline, I wish I could finish stories as fast as you can.--I am much obliged to you for the sight of Olivia, and think you have done for her very well; but the good-for-nothing father, who was the real author of all her faults and sufferings, should not escape unpunished. I hope he hung
himself, or took the name of Bone or underwent some direful
penance or other."
In the meantime Henry's illness had been the cause of Jane Austen's making a very interesting acquaintance. Mr. Haden,
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the clever young apothecary, was a friend of the Rev. J. S. Clarke, who was librarian to the Prince Regent at Carlton House. A great deal of what we hear of George IV is unfavorable, but he was an artist. That monument to his taste, the Pavilion at Brighton, with its blending of Chinese and Hindu architecture, conveys something of the breadth of the Prince Regent's taste. Another aspect of it is indicated by the fact that by 1815 he had become a profound admirer of the novels of Jane Austen. He had a set of those already published in each of the houses he was accustomed to occupy; his admiration was so well known to his librarian, that when Mr. Haden told his friend that the lady who had written Pride and Prejudice was actually in London, and that he had met her at the bedside of one of his patients, Mr. Clarke knew that the news would be well
worthwhile carrying to his employer. The Regent asked Mr. Clarke to invite Miss Jane Austen to see the library at Carlton House, and to show her every attention in his power. Jane had been distressed at Henry's habit of doing away with her anonymity wherever he went, but here was a result of his behavior that could not but please her.
Carlton House, built for the Regent by Holland, presented a classical exterior, with the pillars that now adorn the National Gallery, but behind this façade, the ruling tone was one of Gothic fantasy. The hall, it is true, with its black-and-white marble pavement, its walls of verd-antique and pillars of brown sienna marble, was classical in design; but the rooms were decorated in such colors as recall Horace Walpole's descriptions of the emotional effects of Gothic art: there were the anterooms in crimson and gold, blue and rose color; the blue velvet closet in blue, gold and bronze, the great crimson drawing room, decorated in green and crimson, rose color and gilt; the dining room was all Gothic, with pillars whose
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capitals were formed by the carved plumes of the Prince of Wales; the conservatory was also Gothic, with a fan-vaulted roof, a nave and two aisles; from scientific regard to the plants, the tracery of the roof was filled in with clear glass, but the windows to the north and south were of rich stained glass, showing armorial bearings.
Into this astonishing establishment walked Miss Jane Austen on the morning of November 13th. Mr. Clarke was exceptionally attentive, and kindness itself. He not only had had instructions from the Prince Regent to do everything in his power, but he was a personal admirer of Jane Austen's work, and his care of her dispelled the nervousness that attends the private person on first entering a royal residence; not that Jane Austen was likely to have been so much overcome as
many; she was accustomed to large houses. Carlton House itself was not the size of Stoneleigh Abbey, but the scene was so extraordinary that whether from nervousness or interest and surprise, or from all three, when she had come away she realized that she was not
absolutely certain of what Mr. Clarke had said; she thought he had said that the Prince Regent would take it kindly if her next novel were dedicated to him; and that if she would like so to dedicate it, he was empowered to tell her that she could do so without any further ceremony; but it was so dream-like in her recollection that she could not feel certain of it. She was obliged to send a note to Mr. Clarke, asking him to repeat what he had said; she apologized for troubling him, but it was really necessary to be quite sure, as she said: "I should be equally concerned to appear presumptuous or ungrateful."
Mr. Clarke replied the following day. He said: "It is certainly not incumbent on you to dedicate your work now in the Press to His Royal Highness; but if you wish to do the
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Regent that honor, either now or at any future period, I am happy to send you that permission which need not require any more trouble or solicitation on your part." He went on to praise the novels already published. "Your late works, Madam, and in particular Mansfield Park, reflect the highest honor on your genius and your principles; in every new work your mind seems to increase its energy and powers of discrimination. The Regent has read and admired all your
publications." There was an idea very near to Mr. Clarke's heart, which was that he himself was a very interesting man, both from character and attainments and because he was one who, like
Dogberry, had had losses, and was now in a very honorable worldly position. He thought that the story of such a man would take the reading world by storm if presented by the genius of this remarkable novelist. He said: "I also, dear Madam, wish to be allowed to ask you, to delineate in some future work the habits of life, and character and enthusiasm of a clergyman--who should pass his time between the metropolis and the country--who should be like Beattie's
Minstrel--
Silent when glad, affectionate tho' shy
And now his look was most demurely sad
And now he laughed aloud, yet none knew why."
The clergyman was to be "fond of, and entirely engaged in literature" and "no man's enemy but his own."
Mr. Clarke wrote from the metropolis--from Carlton House, in fact--
but said in the postscript that he was just going into the country.
When Jane Austen wrote in December to tell Mr. Clarke that Emma was on the eve of publication, and that she had not forgotten his kind recommendation of "an early copy
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for Carlton House," she replied also to his letter of the previous month. She thanked him most sincerely for his high praise of her novels and said: "I am too vain to wish to convince you that you have praised th
em beyond their merits." Her greatest anxiety at present, she said, was that Emma should not disgrace what was good in the four others; but she was, she admitted, "strongly haunted with the idea that to those readers who have preferred Pride and Prejudice it will appear inferior in wit, and to those who have preferred Mansfield Park inferior in good sense." Then she dealt with perfect seriousness with Mr. Clarke's suggestion.
"I am quite honored by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman as you gave me the sketch of in your note of Nov. 16th.
But I assure you I am not. The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy, of which I know nothing; or at least be occasionally abundant in quotation and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother tongue and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving. A classical education, or, at any rate, a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress."
In her haste to prove herself quite unequal to the demands of Mr.
Clarke, Jane Austen very naturally exaggerated her own limitations; she sank her knowledge of French and Italian altogether and belittled the extent of her reading in English literature; what she said about her own acquirements in this context is not of value: but her first-hand
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opinion of the influence which personal circumstances must exert upon the novelist's choice of material makes the letter as valuable as those she wrote to Anna Lefroy upon Which is the Heroine? The getting of Emma through the press was now a matter of doubled urgency. Jane wanted to leave town in December, and she could not do so till she had corrected the proofs, and she also wanted
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